Israel is counting the days until
the American presidential election. It only needs, it says to itself, to get
through this year, this month, this week.

It must just keep on ducking and
feinting to protect its security and the lives of its citizens until the
nightmare of this most hostile US president in memory finally ends. Just as it
has been forced to do these past seven years.

For Iran, in stark contrast,
President Obama’s remaining year in office offers a window of unparalleled
opportunity. By gifting its regime more than $100 billion in sanctions relief,
Obama has not only released funds with which the world’s most dangerous
jihadist entity can ratchet up its terrorist and genocidal program, pumping
money into its al-Quds force, Revolutionary Guards and Hamas.

These are also months during which
the president of the most powerful country in the world has signaled that the
Iranian regime can act with total impunity.

Obama is trapped by his fear that
Iran might at any time renege on the nuclear deal and restart its manufacture of
nuclear weapons – which a State Department official nevertheless tells us with
a straight face the regime has abandoned for ever more. With this blackmail
threat now paralyzing the Obama administration, Iran knows it can do what it
wants.

It acted upon that understanding
even before the nuclear deal was completed, when it almost scuttled the
simultaneous and hitherto secret prisoner exchange by detaining the family of
the American hostage Jason Rezaian for several hours at Tehran airport.

When they were finally released
and the prisoner swap completed, US officials sighed with relief – too soon.
For following the lifting of sanctions, Iranian- backed militias promptly
kidnapped three Americans contractors in Iraq.

According to CBS News, the US
Embassy in Baghdad was warned days previously that a Shi’ite militia intended
to seize American hostages. Officials had hoped the Iranian regime would tell it
to back off because of the prisoner swap. So the militia waited until that
exchange was done and dusted. How Tehran must have smirked.

Iran is intent upon stepping up
its four-decade jihadi war against the US and humiliating it in the process.

Just a few days before sanctions
were lifted, the Revolutionary Guards held at gunpoint 10 US sailors whom they
captured on two American patrol boats which for some reason had entered Iranian
territorial waters. On December 26, the Revolutionary Guards test-fired rockets
close to an American aircraft carrier, the USS Harry Truman, in the Strait of
Hormuz.

Such actions are designed to
convey to the world the message that the US is now powerless and Iran
invulnerable.

And with its reaction to every
such incident, the US underscores that message.

It behaves like someone who,
punched repeatedly in the face, insists through a split lip that his attacker is
reforming himself and invites him to hit him again.

Its prisoner swap has positively
incentivized the further taking of American hostages. The deal released seven
Iranians convicted or charged with violating sanctions and halted proceedings
against 14 others, two of whom the US had accused of funneling weapons to
Hezbollah and the Assad regime.

This was in exchange for five
detained Americans who had done nothing wrong. Exchanging suspected and
convicted criminals for innocent hostages now puts other Americans at far
greater risk.

After Iran revealed it was continuing with its illegal ballistic missile
program, the US merely applied sanctions to some of the firms involved. To which
limp response the regime unsurprisingly declared that it would now continue its
ballistic missile program “more seriously.”

Iranian threats to ditch the
nuclear deal almost certainly pushed the International Atomic Energy Authority
to close the file on investigating whether Iran had pursued a nuclear weapons
program in the past, despite finding that it had continued such activities until
at least 2009 – after which the IAEA just didn’t know.

Iran has now announced that it
will build advanced nuclear centrifuges capable of enriching uranium, the key
component in a nuclear weapon, faster than its previous models.

Who can possibly be surprised
that, presented with craven and groveling appeasement, Iran responds by evermore
brazen and defiant aggression? Step forward the US.

Apparently, the White House was
shocked – shocked! – by the kidnapping of its three contractors in Iraq.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The nuclear deal was supposed to
moderate Iranian behavior.

Can the Obama administration
really be that stupid? Yes it can.

One official said sanctions relief
would dilute “the hold on power of the old guard.” Well, here’s how that
one is playing out. Since the deal was agreed on last July, the regime has
stepped up arrests of political opponents in order to ensure that the political
allies of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, dominate next month’s
national elections.

And in the first two weeks of this
month no fewer than 53 Iranians were hanged.

The implications of America’s
strategic, military and moral collapse go far beyond Iran itself. By giving that
regime a free pass for its behavior, the US has sent the clearest signal to
every other rogue state in the world – that it will not push back against them
either.

Accordingly, other countries are
also contemplating the next 12 months with intense alarm. Geopolitical realities
are being reshaped. Saudi Arabia’s belief that the US has hung it out to dry
has already hugely exacerbated Saudi/Iranian tensions.

That means their proxies will be
battling it out in Syria and elsewhere for the foreseeable future.

And Saudi will now be intent on
getting its own nukes, doubtless off the shelf from an obliging rogue state.

Which brings us back to the
Iranian bomb. There are some who believe it already has it, or at least already
has access to nuclear weapons having outsourced the testing of the bomb to North
Korea. Iran is now pondering how to use the weapon to maximum destructive effect
and without leaving its fingerprints on it.

I have no idea whether that is
true.

But given Iran’s close
association with the North Korean nuclear program, with Iranian scientists and
other personnel having been present at three of North Korea’s four nuclear
tests at least, does anyone believe that it could not get the bomb from
Pyongyang even if it has not already done so? In which case, maybe the Iranian
nuclear negotiation was a blind from start to finish. The real action was going
on in North Korea while the dummies of the free world were looking the other
way. The actual point of the deal was to lift sanctions by appearing to give
ground on the nuclear program in Iran itself – thus releasing those billions
to ratchet up Tehran’s deniable, proxy war upon the rest of the world.

Which, thanks to Obama, the UK
government and the rest of the Western dummy class, Iran is now about to do.